The finish which time thus put to this troubled life affected Jennie deeply.
Strong in her kindly, emotional relationships, Gerhardt had appealed to her not only as her father, but as a friend and counselor.
She saw him now in his true perspective, a hard-working, honest, sincere old German, who had done his best to raise a troublesome family and lead an honest life.
Truly she had been his one great burden, and she had never really dealt truthfully with him to the end.
She wondered now if where he was he could see that she had lied.
And would he forgive her?
He had called her a good woman.
Telegrams were sent to all the children.
Bass wired that he was coming, and arrived the next day.
The others wired that they could not come, but asked for details, which Jennie wrote.
The Lutheran minister was called in to say prayers and fix the time of the burial service.
A fat, smug undertaker was commissioned to arrange all the details.
Some few neighborhood friends called—those who had remained most faithful—and on the second morning following his death the services were held.
Lester accompanied Jennie and Vesta and Bass to the little red brick Lutheran church, and sat stolidly through the rather dry services.
He listened wearily to the long discourse on the beauties and rewards of a future life and stirred irritably when reference was made to a hell.
Bass was rather bored, but considerate.
He looked upon his father now much as he would on any other man.
Only Jennie wept sympathetically.
She saw her father in perspective, the long years of trouble he had had, the days in which he had had to saw wood for a living, the days in which he had lived in a factory loft, the little shabby house they had been compelled to live in in Thirteenth Street, the terrible days of suffering they had spent in Lorrie Street, in Cleveland, his grief over her, his grief over Mrs. Gerhardt, his love and care of Vesta, and finally these last days.
"Oh, he was a good man," she thought.
"He meant so well."
They sang a hymn,
"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and then she sobbed.
Lester pulled at her arm.
He was moved to the danger-line himself by her grief.
"You'll have to do better than this," he whispered.
"My God, I can't stand it. I'll have to get up and get out."
Jennie quieted a little, but the fact that the last visible ties were being broken between her and her father was almost too much.
At the grave in the Cemetery of the Redeemer, where Lester had immediately arranged to purchase a lot, they saw the plain coffin lowered and the earth shoveled in.
Lester looked curiously at the bare trees, the brown dead grass, and the brown soil of the prairie turned up at this simple graveside.
There was no distinction to this burial plot. It was commonplace and shabby, a working-man's resting-place, but so long as he wanted it, it was all right.
He studied Bass's keen, lean face, wondering what sort of a career he was cutting out for himself.
Bass looked to him like some one who would run a cigar store successfully.
He watched Jennie wiping her red eyes, and then he said to himself again,
"Well, there is something to her."
The woman's emotion was so deep, so real.
"There's no explaining a good woman," he said to himself.
On the way home, through the wind-swept, dusty streets, he talked of life in general, Bass and Vesta being present.
"Jennie takes things too seriously," he said.
"She's inclined to be morbid. Life isn't as bad as she makes out with her sensitive feelings.
We all have our troubles, and we all have to stand them, some more, some less.
We can't assume that any one is so much better or worse off than any one else.
We all have our share of troubles."
"I can't help it," said Jennie. "I feel so sorry for some people."
"Jennie always was a little gloomy," put in Bass.
He was thinking what a fine figure of a man Lester was, how beautifully they lived, how Jennie had come up in the world.
He was thinking that there must be a lot more to her than he had originally thought.
Life surely did turn out queer. At one time he thought Jennie was a hopeless failure and no good.
"You ought to try to steel yourself to take things as they come without going to pieces this way," said Lester finally.
Bass thought so too.